Kitchen Sink Cookies

Caleb's teaching kitchen is done. He had a small opening — not a celebration exactly, more of a showing — on a Saturday in late October, inviting the people who'd helped build it and a few others who'd be among the first to use it. Art came, moving slowly but present and observant. Carmen told me before we arrived that he'd been having more good days lately, that the late summer had been hard but October was better.

The kitchen is a single room, maybe four hundred square feet, with a central worktable and a good wood stove and a long counter with two gas burners. Caleb had built the shelving himself over the summer, simple and solid, and stocked it with the basics: dried beans, corn, chiles, herbs from his garden. The tools were minimal and chosen well. It looked exactly like what it was — a room where work could happen, where knowledge could pass from one person to the next in the oldest way, through doing.

Caleb cooked lunch for us in the new kitchen: venison from this year's hunt, beans from his garden, cornbread in the wood stove. It was the first meal made in that kitchen and he served it with a quietness that I recognized as a man who had done a hard thing and knew it and didn't need to be told. Art ate two bowls and said, looking around the room: "This is what I should have built twenty years ago." Caleb said: "You built the people who built this." Art thought about it and said he supposed that was true.

Driving home from Caleb’s opening, I kept thinking about what Art said — that it was what he should have built twenty years ago — and about the way Caleb just nodded and kept serving beans. There’s a kind of cooking that isn’t about showing off, that’s just about feeding people well with what you have and knowing your hands. That afternoon put me in the mood for something like that, so when I got home I made these Kitchen Sink Cookies: no fuss, no theme, just everything good thrown together, which is really all a teaching kitchen is too.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 27 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup butterscotch chips
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup chopped salted pretzels
1/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
Flaky sea salt, for topping (optional)

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Whisk dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with the granulated and brown sugars on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add eggs and vanilla. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla extract and mix until fully combined.
Combine wet and dry. Reduce mixer speed to low and gradually add the flour mixture, stirring just until no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix.
Fold in the mix-ins. Using a wooden spoon or spatula, fold in the chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, oats, coconut, pretzels, and nuts until evenly distributed throughout the dough.
Scoop and arrange. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 2 inches apart. Press each mound slightly to flatten. Sprinkle with flaky sea salt if using.
Bake. Bake for 10—12 minutes, until the edges are golden but the centers still look slightly underdone. They will firm up as they cool.
Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Kitchen Sink Cookies — The Kind of Recipe a Teaching Kitchen Was Made For